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IRIS Director Blog

My thoughts are with the Haitian people

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From David Adam’s article about the CARMA International report, Western Media Coverage of Humanitarian Disasters, January 2006:

“The western media’s response to … humanitarian disasters is driven by “selfishness and egocentricity”…  Domestic politics, tourism and feel-good tales about western heroism and donations make a story… rather than human suffering.” The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2006

I had two thoughts yesterday morning, when I heard the CBC news reporting the devastating earthquake near Port-au-Prince. The first was about how limited the capacity of Haiti will be to respond to this disaster, given that it is one of poorest countries in the world. Haiti has one of the smallest per capita ecological footprints in the world, at just 0.5 ha per person. Compare this to a whopping 7.1 ha/person for the average Canadian. Yes, one average Canadian consumes the resources used by a total of 14 Haitians. I just shook my head in dismay at the ongoing suffering of the Haitian people, recalling their continuing political turmoil of the last decade, which included the US-backed removal of their elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. And arguably, this history clearly plays a role in the suffering created by the impact of the earthquake.

My second thought was that because Canada’s Governer-General, Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean, is originally from Haiti, that the kind of self-interested Western media response to humanitarian crises, described in the CARMA International report, may not, for a change, happen here. What do I mean? Well, the media plays a major role in defining a disaster and  CARMA (who are global media analysts) analyzed how various natural and man-made disasters that resulted in high loss of life were being covered in the Western press. The report’s main conclusion was that “Western self-interest is the pre-condition for significant coverage of a humanitarian crisis”. It’s great to read the report directly, but David Adam’s article gives a good summary (Western media ‘underplay disasters in developing world’ in the Guardian Weekly, Feb 10-16 2006 p.27, and Crisis of Communications, The Guardian, Monday Jan 30 2006).

The report examined 2,000 articles from 64 daily and weekly publications from among  9 countries (including UK, USA and Australia, with emphasis on the European press). The newspaper coverage of 6 disasters was compared:
1. Earthquake in Pakistani-Kashmir
2. Indian Ocean Tsunami
3. Earthquake in Bam, Iran (2003)
4. Darfur, Sudan - a humanitarian crisis exacerbated by environmental degradation
5. Hurricane Katrina, USA
6. Hurricane Stan, Central America, especially Guatemala

Each article started with a 50 point score and points were subtracted depending on:

Headline, Placement in the paper, Portrayal of the situation and Evidence of bias. The articles scored were those published from 2 days before to 10 weeks after the disaster. Here’s what the report found: that there was “no link between the scale of a disaster and resulting media coverage”. For example, Hurricane Katrina received the highest media coverage (referred to 3,105 times in UK papers), while Hurricane Stan received the lowest media coverage (referred to, only 34 times in UK papers). But, both hurricanes killed over 1,000 people.

"The hurricane Stanley emergency stands out as the worst indictment of the selfish western approach to humanitarian disasters. There is no obvious significant economic or political interest. Consequently, there is virtually no coverage of any kind beyond the first few days." (CARMA International, 2006).

And to think, that Haiti was on my mind only a week ago, as I headed back to Toronto from a one-week cruise in the western Caribbean. During my trip, I had a number of interesting encounters with several of the many Haitian immigrants to Florida, including an adventure with a taxi driver who got lost between the port and the Amtrak station. This story was going to be in one of my forthcoming travel blogs about whether it’s possible to holiday with a low carbon footprint – but hey, CARMA, I get it, and I hope that other people do, too – it’s not about me and my recent chats with Haitians - IT’S ABOUT DOING SOMETHING, BOTH SHORT AND LONG-TERM, TO RELIEVE THE IMMEDIATE SUFFERING OF THE HAITIAN PEOPLE AND TO SERIOUSLY ADDRESS THEIR “POVERTY-DRIVEN LOW-LEVEL OF EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS”!
Is it to much to ask every Canadian with an ecological footprint that is greater than 2 ha to reduce their footprint by 1/14th and to demand that the Federal Government  direct those resources to the average Haitian? Simplistic, yes, but worth reflecting on.

Dawn R. Bazely

Please note that the Ecological Footprint figures are from WWF Living Planet Report 2008.

Who needs a fair hearing? Have the Skeptics had enough of a hearing?

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I started writing this blog post in June 2009, which was long before I found out that Lomborg was back on the public stage. In retropect, it's interesting to see how my thinking was evolving. I was very cool with giving skeptics a fair hearing, and the tone is quite light. However, 6 months on, I am definitely feeling much less patient than I was back in the summer. How times change...

My blog about animal rights activists' tendency to be as biased in their use of the peer-reviewed literature as climate change deniers got me thinking that I'd better pay some attention to both groups' claims that the majority of scientists are actually biased against them.

In the case of animal rights activists, a recent court case about cormorants, upheld Parks Canada's culling of cormorants on Middle Island to reduce mortality of the trees, plants and other animals.  Birders have striven to make the case that cormorant numbers were always really high, and that they should not be managed.  But there's actually not a lot of evidence to support their position.

In the case of climate change deniers, the website Skeptical Science examines the science of global warming scepticism, and is well worth reading.  There's also a great, detailed BBC News article that investigated the claims of these skeptics that their work is being ignored (hint: there wasn't much evidence to support their allegations).

Of course, the most famous ecological skeptic is probably Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the controversial, The Skeptical Environmentalist. He got into trouble with a whole lot of ecology and evolution biology professors.  Back in 2003, I actually ran a graduate course which examined his various claims in detail.  The students had lots of fun investigating and locating the bits of various chapters where Lomborg was quoting research completely out of context."

OK - so that blog was back in mid 2009. My current position on all of these skeptics, who keep on trying to challenge the basic science, is: "If you wanna debate this with me, you need to earn the right to do so and to take up my time - so, first you need to submit a 10 page, referenced essay (with peer-reviewed literature - not these rubbish blogs - and I include my blogs in the latter category) to me, explaining who Karl Popper is, who Thomas Kuhn is, and what the scientific method is. We can talk after that." Interestingly, the Globe Columnist, Leah McLaren wrote a great column on December 19 2009, called "Why are we calling on an ex-call girl for relationship tips?" that aims to explain why people cannot differentiate good (or informed) advice from bad (uninformed). Check it out.

Dawn R. Bazely

COP15: The entitled, the resentful and the powerless

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BY PROFESSOR STUART SCHOENFELD, CHAIR OF SOCIOLOGY, GLENDON COLLEGE, YORK UNIVERSITY ( schoenfe@yorku.ca)

From one perspective, the climate change conference in Copenhagen looks rational.  It’s about science – understanding the implications of the largest scientific project in history – and it’s about deliberation – well briefed representatives of 192 nations brought together to write an international treaty.  But the meeting is not so rational.  People come to the negotiating table not only with interests, but also with emotions.  The negotiators in Copenhagen represent some who feel entitled, others who feel resentful and yet others who feel powerless.  This play of emotions seems to be the story of the conference, a global summit of desires, fears, outrage and frustration.  Out of this mix of emotions, the challenge is to feel and act on the latent but powerful feeling of mutual responsibility.

The feelings of resentment and powerlessness come into focus when the feelings of entitlement are acknowledged.  No leader of any developed country can say to its citizens, “We are not entitled to our way of life.”  The point of view is implicit in the language: “we” are developed; those who do not share our prosperity are “developing” or “underdeveloped.”  Surely the road ahead, as the international development industry has taught for decades, is for others to model themselves on us, to work hard and succeed, just as we have.  “We” can help the underdeveloped.  Money is available for assistance in climate adaptation and mitigation.  There are intellectual and organizational resources as well to support the transformation of the global energy system.

All this good will does not challenge the feelings of entitlement in developed countries, or even admit that entitlement is an issue.  People have become accustomed to - and the economic system dependent on - transportation, food and building practices that are comfortable and satisfying, but unsustainable.  Even leisure activities that produce high greenhouse gas emissions – air travel, destination holidays, cruise ships – seem unlikely to change dramatically on a voluntary basis.  This sense of entitlement is understandable.  Prosperous countries have meaningful historical narratives of hardship, struggle and success.

It is precisely this sense of entitlement that is the focus of the resentments that have surfaced so strongly in Copenhagen.  China, India and the others in the G77 use the language of “historical responsibility” - greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere when the West dominated industrial production.   The West has been responsible for the problem; the West has the responsibility to clean up the mess. Because the West’s prosperity is based on creating a global crisis, it also has the responsibility to assist others with the clean technologies that the global crisis requires.  To do otherwise is to ask the victims to pay for the damages.  The resentment gets even stronger.  Consider the history of the India textile industry.  When India was a colony, village weavers, using low GHG producing hand looms, were driven out of business by the importation of cheap cloth from British coal fired textile mills.  Now, India, with its impoverished multitudes, is being asked to restrain low per capita green house gas emissions in order for the West to continue its prosperity and higher per capita GHG emissions!  Perhaps the expressions of resentment are partly verbal posturing, intended to produce an agreement more favorable to the interests of the G77 plus China, but the outrage and anger are much more than tactics.

Some other countries, lacking the political leverage of China, India and a handful of others, are the beggars at the banquet.  The 39 members of the Alliance of Small Island States are, with the exception of Singapore, low income and vulnerable.  They can plead, but their ability to influence is slight.  The Alliance includes the most desperate, and the most frustrated.

The outcome at COP15 depends on more than the science, the negotiators’ clarity on national interests, and the skills at compromise.  The outcome, and even more the follow through, depend as well on the emotions that come out of the conference.  The perpetuation of entitlement, resentment and powerlessness jeopardize global success.  Rising to the challenge of climate change requires other emotions, of mutual care and concern, across the globe and across generations.  Success will ultimately come from shared personal commitments, and leadership that evokes them.

Stuart is a long-serving member of the IRIS Executive.

Dawn R. Bazely

Let’s hack into our own emails and smear ourselves with our own incriminating, out of context phrases!

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Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, when I told several colleagues, some weeks ago, that the CRU (Climate Research Unit) at UEA (University of East Anglia) e-mail hacking incident was silly, and to ignore it.

It has not gone away, because climate-change deniers are fully invested in launching what appears to me to be an across-the-board attack on peer reviewed science. This has happened before, to whit, the lobbying for and subsequent removal of Robert Watson as Chair of IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).

How on earth should the scientific community respond? Well, I challenge everyone to hack into your own emails using terms such as "rejection", "rejected", "plagiarism", "trick", "fix" and see what emails you come up with. Then you can find incriminating phrases that can be taken out of context and used to self-smear your own integrity as a scientist.

Here's what I found when I searched 4 years of my backed-up emails for "trick". In a 2007  email, I wrote that Doritos will provide an alternative solution to dealing with the consequences of climate change: "doritos should do the trick". Please note that Drs. Vicari and Koh, as former students of mine, are clearly fellow members of this conspiracy and we are, in fact, hoping that this snack company will fund our next field season.

Dawn R. Bazely

Why does anyone bother with Bjørn Lomborg?

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Here's another reason why history matters. Because anyone who has done their research into Bjørn Lomborg's history would be aware that most of what he has published in the peer-reviewed journal literature (and it's not much), has hardly ever been cited by other academic scholars in their peer-reviewed journal articles! (I checked Lomborg's citation record on Web of Science). He and his appallingly researched book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (defended by Cambridge University Press as peer-reviewed), were investigated for academic dishonesty. While the book was found guilty (but not the author), the decision was later overturned by a Danish government review for "process" reasons.

Like Daniel Simberloff, when I read the chapters in the book on which I would consider myself an expert, I was shocked at the poor coverage of the pertinent literature. My own book with Judy Myers was also published by Cambridge University Press, and I was therefore interested in the overall implications for and interpretations of the quality of their in-house book review system. How had Lomborg's book gotten through the process, and was it really as bad as it seemed? So, in 2003, I taught a Biology graduate course in which students "deconstructed" the Lomborg book's chapters. They scrutinized Lomborg's sources, and detailed the many ways in which he skewed and misrepresented the data. Frankly, if Lomborg was a new Master's student in Biology, and he submitted any of these chapters to me as essays, he would receive a failing grade. The reason for this would have nothing to do with his polemical positions, because good scholarship is essentially about challenging the status quo, and everything to do with his poor scholarship. But Lomborg has simply never acknowledged his shortcomings. A few years ago I wrote to Scanorama, the SAS airlines magazine (the one you find in your seat pocket), after they profiled Lomborg, and made the following points:

"Dear Sir - I enjoyed your article about Dr. Lomborg in the October 2004 issue
of Scanorama, and feel compelled to share four thoughts I had after reading
it.
1. Dr. Lomborg is photogenic, and I doubt he would have received so much
attention if this was not the case.
2.  As a practicing field ecologist, I learned early on to avoid consulting
colleagues who are trained as pure statisticians for help in analyzing my
data, because they lack practical experience.  I invariably feel more confused
after a conversation with a statistician, than I do beforehand.  Dr. Lomborg's
book left me feeling both irritated and confused.
3.  It is particularly noteworthy that the people who lodged the formal
complaint against Dr. Lomborg were not environmental activists but first and
foremost, peer-reviewed scientists, with pretty comfortable careers in
academia.  Why did they exercise themselves when they did not need to?
4.  From the point of view of Cambridge University Press, the publisher of The
Skeptical Environmentalist, that there is no such thing as bad publicity when
it comes to book sales.
Sincerely, Dawn R. Bazely, Associate Professor, Biology Department, York
University, Toronto, Canada."

Apparently some form of my letter was published, although I never saw it. And then, I simply forgot about the book, except that I refer to it as an excellent example of how to misrepresent the biodiversity literature. BUT now, I find that this is the man sponsored by the Munk Lectures to debate Elizabeth May and George Monbiot? And, no one in the Canadian media and certainly not on the Munk Debate website is making any reference to Lomborg's history as an academic against whom formal charges of dishonesty were brought? The latter event is so rare and huge that it cannot and should not be ignored, regardless of the highly political outcome. Academics gripe and moan about each other, but are loathe to spend time insisting that formal charges of academic dishonesty be brought. I have been directly involved in only one such formal case at York University in the early 1990's, in which a PhD dissertation was found to contain manufactured data. The entire incident was quite emotionally exhausting for everyone who was involved both in uncovering the fraud and in investigating it.

Contrary to what one might expect in terms of a balanced assessment of Lomborg, the Munk Debates website states that Esquire Magazine described him as: "one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century". What, influential like the Jonas Brothers and Simon Cowell of American and British Idol? I would certainly also approach all of Lomborg's subsequent writing with the working hypothesis that his selective  and biased approach is likely unchanged. Why would it change, when it has served him so well in the past?

This apparent lack of willingness by the Canadian media to research the full picture surrounding Lomborg can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but, if you want an analysis that is more of a political than scientific deconstruction, I would direct you to the Lomborg analysis on The Way Things Break blog, and the post called Lomborg and Playing the Long Game.

Dawn R. Bazely

Accepting personal responsibility

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The front page of today's Globe and Mail has a story about how  staff and Board members at the Toronto Humane Society are facing various criminal charges for cruelty to animals. The story broke this past summer and I was appalled to learn how animals were being treated and how they were not being euthanized, even if they were suffering. An article today, relates how  some Board members were unaware that they might be facing charges and were surprised. Having sat on two non-profit daycare boards, I learned early on about my very serious responsibilities as a board member, and what their implications were, vis-a-vis my liability. The buck has to stop somewhere. For me, this story is as much about cruelty to animals, apparently perpetrated by self-described  animal welfare supporters, as it is about yet another segment of society unwilling to take responsibility for its actions.

Last week, I heard an amazing lecture by Dr. Daniel Krewski, from the University of Ottawa about assessing public health risks. It was the Morris Katz Memorial Lecture at York University.

Dr. Krewski made many excellent points, but one that stuck in my mind had to do with perceptions of responsibility. He explained  that when the public is polled about who should take responsibility for such crises as BSE (Mad Cow) and other health threats, they invariably respond that, it's "all of us" who bear responsibility for action. I saw this in the IRIS survey on climate change. BUT, BUT, BUT - Dr. Krewski told us, that when the public is asked whether government, or the agency  charged with acting to protect the public interest is doing enough, a majority invariably responds, that not enough is being done! Ahah, so ready to blame someone else.

This observation does not surprise me because, these days, I am very accustomed to having students blame their poor academic performance directly on me, their professor. There has been a significant shift in the last 20 years, in terms of how much responsibility students are willing to accept for their own actions. A very high number of students (not all, by any means) really just want to blame someone else. I see this tendency in my own children, and it's clearly become an entrenched societal norm. So - what does this mean for taking personal action on the environment, climate change and sustainability? Well... what do you think?

PLEASE THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND WHOM IT IS AFFECTING! Without that reflection, how will people truly be motivated to downsize their carbon footprints? On the other hand, if you are reading this, then you already know what I am talking about!

Dawn R. Bazely

Sustainable Shopping, Feng Shui, Suze Orman and Debt

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The personal debt of North Americans - both in Canada and the US is staggering. Oprah's "O" magazine's long-time financial advisor, Suze Orman, has published a great book on Women & Money that tells the reader how to track their personal spending. Apparently many North Americans can't do this. Suze makes the link between the lack of basic awareness of where the money's going and personal debt. The Certified General Accountants of Canada 2009 report, "Where has the money gone: The state of Canadian household debt in a stumbling economy" makes this link eminently clear. At the same time, there are tons of tv shows and books on how to declutter your life. They draw a clear connection between personal stress and the accumulation of stuff - as in buying it from the mall. A search of chapters.indigo.ca available book titles with the keyword "Feng Shui" - which, in North America, is basically about getting harmony into your life by throwing out stuff, returned 606 titles.

So, here's the thing - most people actually feel happier and calmer in emptier spaces with less stuff in them. If everyone bought LESS stuff, for many people, there would be LESS debt. These people would then REDUCE their ecological footprint and their resource consumption. They would also INCREASE their personal sustainability index. Such a simple idea, yet seemingly so difficult for most North Americans to accomplish.  Has it become easier during the current recession?  And will the notion of living within one's means and differentiating more between needing and wanting become entrenched before our ice caps melt? I don't know the answer to these questions, but they are certainly something that I think about a lot.

Dawn Bazely

Sustainability and exhaustion – don’t let it get you down

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[photopress:Messy_desktop1.jpg,thumb,pp_image][photopress:Messy_desk2.jpg,thumb,pp_image][photopress:messy_study_3.jpg,thumb,pp_image]Being a director of a sustainability institute and an academic is very tiring - even for a hyper Type A personality who can still put in a 16 hour field day. Not only am I always having to think about my ecological and carbon footprints, and where to buy good offsets, but in a world of greenwashing, scrutinizing everything for its authenticity is also de rigeur.  Uggh - AND THEN THERE'S THE BLOGGING. I have always had two settings - on and off. I like to jump out of bed and hit the ground running, but these days, I often feel like a car engine that's starting on a cold winter's morning. So, it's time for a mechanical overhaul. Here's what I have used  in the past, and will again, to fix the stalled engine:

These may also be helpful for those of you out there who feel overwhelmed by your life, the state of the world and the fact that Terence Corcoran in the National Post is still insisting that the science of climate change is suspect:

1. A life coach (I wrote about this in the article, Coaching for My Life, University Affairs, 2005) (I don't have time for this, these days, but you might).

2. Some great organizational and behavioural modification (often, from business) books. My ipod is filled with audiobooks such as Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy, The Golden Rule of Schmoozing by Aye Jaye, Ready for Anything by Dave Allen, The 60 Second Procrastinator by Jeff Davidson (may be out of print, so borrow it from the library), Your Management Sucks by Mark Stevens, Women and Money by Suze Orman, Crucial Confrontations and Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson and colleagues, Making Work Work by Julie Morgernstern (Oprah's organizing guru - and my favourite organization person to read, including her other book, Never Read Email in the Morning), What got you here, won't get you there! by Marshall Goldsmith (and, of course, The Art of War).

3. Podcasts. If you are a poor student and can't afford to pay for a life coach or audiobooks, then download some podcasts, such as Motivation to Move's Daily Boost, The Suze Orman podcast (on itunes), Marcus Buckingham (big time life coach) and Oprah's Take Control of Your Career and Your Life (itunes), and while you are at it, grab some Yoga lessons from Yogamazing (itunes), plus the Manager Tools podcast (itunes) will give you all kinds of sound advice on organizing things.

4. Other people who are more swamped than me: and, you can see the incredible mess on my computer screen and in my home office (above), and feel a sense of superiority. I find that it's always comforting to know that someone else is worse off. Here's what I will be using today, in my surroundings to give me motivation and energy:

The 2006 farewell Globe and Mail article by Ken Wiwa about his decision to return with his family to the UK and to work with the Nigerian government,  pinned to the wall in front of me. The dried edelweiss flower that my former student, and current research collaborator, Andrew Tanentzap gave me as a gift, from a trip to Europe. The photos of past and present grad students and family that are part of the clutter: they make me smile and feel guilty at the same time - a great carrot and stick, combined into one item!

[photopress:desk_calm3.jpg,thumb,pp_image][photopress:desk_calm1.jpg,thumb,pp_image][photopress:desk_calm2.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Dawn Bazely

“Why Woody?” – for an honorary degree

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A very nice reporter from the Toronto Star asked me this question on the phone yesterday, as I was standing in a field in Milton, Ontario, next to 16-Milgiant 2e Creek. I was collecting seeds from Giant Hogweed, an invasive and somewhat toxic plant (see right).

Tomorrow, York University will confer an honorary degree on Woody Harrelson. Back in January, when I wrote my nomination letter, I had no idea that the announcement of this would coincide with the recent release of a popular commercial movie, starring him! I also had no idea as to how receptive the university committee responsible for Honorary Degrees would be to our nomination! After all, universities are very conservative institutions, as I found out from the raised eyebrows, back in the mid 1990s, when I had the temerity to suggest to some colleagues that we ought to consider nominating Oprah Winfrey for an honorary degree. At the time, she was dictating what America and my local Mum's Book Club was reading, through her book selections.

There have been a lot opinions offered about York conferring this degree on Woody Harrelson, in response to the CBC story. In the wake of my interview with the Star reporter, I think there's a few things worth mentioning from my answer to her question "Why Woody?"

1. The whole idea can be traced back to 2006 and the conversation that IRIS started about making York's course kits carbon neutral. Along the way, not only did we discover a huge interest amongst our students in the issue of climate change, but we also learned a lot about how unsustainable the publishing and printing industry is, in terms of how it produces books:  inks, paper, and the energy footprint of shipping books; akin to shipping bricks, a friend in publishing has told me.

2. Then, in August 2008, I was invited by the committee organizing our Fall Green Week, to suggest environmental and sustainability-related documentaries for screening. Since I am always forcing my family to watch educational docs, I had lots of ideas, as did others, and we had a lively discussion. I thought that An Inconvenient Truth was too ubiquitous to have much appeal at the time, and that Who Killed the Electric Car, was just a wee bit too boring. But Go Further was different from anything that I had ever seen, and might just be the ticket for an undergraduate audience. It was not at all preachy and took a very different approach to engaging youth than  found in the standard lecture.

3. When we screened the film, through a colleague at York, who turned out to have a brother in publishing, we also learned about the companion book to the documentary, which is incredibly sustainably produced. From him, we learned that the appearance of these kinds of books tends to have limited appeal to the purchasing public. This is why the books in stores don't tend to look like the Go Further book: they don't really sell that well. In other words - environmentally friendly, unshiny, dull-looking books don't cut it on the shelf - YET.

So there you have it, the boring story of why I got involved in this nomination. We did a bunch of research into and learning about a couple of key items of academic life - documentaries and books and learned about Woody Harrelson, too. And, as a good academic should be, I was also rather skeptical about the nomination venture. As I  wrote in my  letter:

"Mr. Harrelson has turned out to be an embodiment of our new York slogan and our old motto, that the way must be tried. Who would have thought that the goofy bartender from “Cheers” would turn out to be such an important environmental leader and activist?"

If universities are to be leaders, then we must be receptive to different modes of teaching and learning, and be prepared to recognize and honor them.

Dawn Bazely

Markets and trading – part of being human

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Sitting in a research centre with a mandate to engage in sustainability-related research across the entire university, means that I usually get to hear all sides of arguments. And there is certainly debate about everything. While the lack of consensus, or diversity of opinion, that exists in academia, may often confuse members of our society who don't have the luxury of reading primary peer-reviewed literature, the fact is, that debate and argument are at the crux of what we do as academics. (And, yes, there IS overwhelming agreement in the peer-reviewed literature that human-created greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are enhancing the planetary greenhouse effect).

These days, I frequently listen to divergent, and passionate opinions on whether carbon markets, carbon taxes, and carbon offsets  are good or bad. This debate is especially heated among members of the academic community interested in the link between climate change, ecological footprints, adaptation and mitigation, and poverty reduction.

My view, is that humans are hard-wired to trade stuff. Shopping, the souq, local farmer's markets, the Christmas bazaar, the summer fete, and the invention of money all come out of this fundamental behaviour. So, whether or not one thinks, that carbon offsets are the modern day equivalent of buying indulgences in the hope of saving one's soul, there will eventually be prices put on previously largely unpriced resources such as carbon and water. This will happen just as soon as we have agreed-upon ways of quantifying them. Advocates for human rights, justice and equity simply must ensure that they have seat at these negotiating tables. The fact that Canada's failure to endorse water as a human right keeps popping up as a topic at campus World Water Day celebrations, emphasises this for me.

image001

I have been very interested to encounter, in my role as IRIS' Director, in the last few years, businesses that aim at engaging with the practicalities of these incipient and emerging resource markets. For example, I recently received in my inbox, the XPV Waterview Newsletter for July/August 2009, which I actually opened, and read. After digesting the last line, "This should not be construed as an offering document and is solely intended to inform readers of recent developments with XPV Capital and the water sector.", I read the newsletter again. Then I discovered more of these newsletters buried in my inbox and they were great, too. My interest was piqued, and I then went to the website, to try and figure out exactly who had put together such an interesting and informative document with an amazing cartoon about beavers, that I will certainly refer to in my Ecology lectures.

image004

So, XPV Capital is, quite simply, a VC (venture capital) or investment firm with a great website, especially its "water facts" feed and news updates. I learned outfrom the "About" page, that:

"XPV Capital Corporation partners with entrepreneurs in emerging water companies by:

• Investing capital to ignite your growth; and
• Leveraging our extensive knowledge, expertise, and contacts to help build your business.

XPV is committed to helping you and your business succeed.  As experienced water entrepreneurs and investment professionals, we understand the unique opportunities and challenges of emerging water companies.  We work hard to give you the competitive advantage that only the right investor partnership can deliver."

Now, I am a biologist, who teaches the water cycle and has been showing the marvellous 1993 Dutch government documentary, "Troubled Water" in my 2nd year Ecology course for years. But, here are business people, aware of the same data and information as I am, and acting upon them in quite a different way. As Mr. Spock would say, "fascinating". The XPV website also told me on the investments page:

"The way we produce, manage, and use water is forced to change and is impacting governments, corporations, and citizens around the world. This drastic transformation in the water industry will create unprecedented investment opportunities as water transitions from a simple life sustaining substance taken for granted by many, into one of the most economically and socially valuable resources of the 21st century." Given our propensity as a species, to trade stuff, this is bang-on, and, to my mind, indicative of the obvious next steps to emerge, following the concerns raised by such books such as Marq De Villier's Water (2001), and Vandana Shiva's Water Wars (2002). Although, it's taken longer than I would have thought it would.

Even in Canada, we need to manage and conserve water more effectively - and I for one am delighted that XPV is generating business and investment in this area that highlights these needs. I look forward to reading more newsletters.

Dawn R. Bazely

PS Troubled Water, the documentary, reports how "In a fictitious newcast from the year 2018, reporters discuss a future where water is scarce, and the causes of the crisis are found in the past, in poor management and lack of understanding of the many uses for water, for food through recreation, that have to be managed as well, in order to conserve water for the future." (Video 0572 in York U's Sound and Moving Image Library)

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